Update September
I did not get to submit an entry this year, got hit with a wonderful bout of Crohn’s fatigue and just wasn’t able to dedicate enough time to it. The idea that I had settled on was running a struggling print newspaper in the run up to an election. The player controlled the stories the newspaper would print with the aim of trying to influence the election, increasing readership/sales, and set the newspaper up to survive post election. The “newsroom” was a daily list of topics that the player could assign to their pool of journalists as well as a secret list of stories that political opponents wanted the paper to run that would either support their campaign or smear their opponents. It would be up to the player to decide if they wanted to take the bribes to run stories and so forth. Everything would have consequences e.g. running bribed story would come at the cost of a journalist’s story which could make them unhappy at not being published, the player could come under investigation for running too many stories for one opponent, etc.
Update August 14th
I can’t believe it’s been a year already. Yikes. This is the 13th year of the jam and this year’s theme is Triskaidekaphobia the “fear or avoidance of the number 13”.
Tzameti
I have a very early idea based off a movie I saw a long time ago called “13 Tzameti“. “Tzameti” is Georgian for “13” so the full title is “13 13”. The plot and overall theme of the movie are very dark and a lot of what works for the movie is the amount of tension that keeps ramping up. I’m not quite sure as to how much of the randomness involved in the movie will transfer over into a game.
Working as a PA for a celebrity
A potentially less sinister idea is working as a PA for a celebrity who cannot have anything related to 13 in their lives at all and your job is to remove any of those obstacles from their lives: they can’t have any events on the 13th, they can’t film for 13 days in a row, interviews cannot have 13 questions, they can’t be 13th in line for photographers, the numbers or words “13” cannot be in any scripts they receive etc etc. I feel like this would be a very text heavy game but with the potential for mini-game puzzles for navigating around or trying to augment the presence of 13.
“13 minutes to the Moon”
One of my favourite podcast series in recent years is the BBC’s “13 minutes to the Moon” for the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing for the 1st season and Apollo 13 for the 2nd. There is plenty in there in relation to fears, problems and potential disasters.
Every 13th…
The other usual flood of very basic ideas are: something happens in game every 13 seconds/shots/moves and that “something” could be a weapon change, the world rotates, the game or rules changes
With a lot of other things going on I’ll see if I can get an entry together this year. And I think I’ll try to keep updating this page as I go rather than multiple posts.